New website launched for Senator Lundy

Over the past two weeks I’ve redone and consolidated the 3 existing websites into Senator Kate Lundy’s new website. I’ve been really impressed to be reading through her historical posts, podcasts, blogs, speeches, and the efforts she’s made (often enough on her own) with technologies such as Joomla, Frontpage, Audacity, Twitter and more. We’ve already imported over 400 articles!

Anyway, the new site is up, there are still some tweaks we are doing, and there are still a few media releases we are importing (manually) from her old Frontpage website (argh!!!!) but it’d be great to get people’s perspectives and feedback.

One thing it would be good to know is what do people what to know about? How could we – through her online presence – help make Australian Government processes more transparent? What are some good examples from overseas? Links, stories and ideas welcome!

4 Responses to New website launched for Senator Lundy

How could we – through her online presence – help make Australian Government processes more transparent?

I hope this doesn’t sound like a stuck record but… let’s look at Stephen Conroy and the filtering thing, which is reasonably close to Lundy’s portfolio. Let’s leave aside whether it will work, or whether it’d be desirable, or whether it’s a good tradeoff, and just look at the way the debate was conducted. There’s precious little transparency there, no attempt to make an argument on the merits or from values, just an attempt to smear people and to run straight over people making quite reasonable points, or to fob them off with unresponsive answers. Respectable surveys found something like 85+% of people opposed, which he apparently just ignored.

Upgrading to WordPress is nice enough, but what’s actually needed is a change of attitude towards genuinely listening to and integrating the input.

The Rudd government seems to do that very well in some areas but very poorly in others. I don’t know why.

I think getting more online and public participation in policy making and decisions would help with transparency, and then it is a matter of trying to get more transparency up the line. This is going to be a long and hard road to transparent and open government, and we are just trying to make a start

Really Pia, have you lost your mind, was it not you at LinuX Conf who was saying things about internet filtering and agreeing with the fact that we need a bill of rights, just seems strange that you would change who you are for a political role that you can never influence anyway… anyways just upset cause i actually thought despite what people say in the open source community you had commitment to your belifs? Shame Shame

Hi “comeon”, what are you talking about? How have I changed who I am? I am committed to my beliefs, and I’m not sure what you are referring to. I think that one of the best ways to help make things better is to participate in the process, but I don’t believe this will mean I have to compromise my beliefs. In fact I’ve already said publicly that one of the things I’m excited about is helping improve transparency and openness in government, so what are you upset about? Happy to chat about it via my blog, but it would be much nicer to know to whom I’m speaking As most people who know me know, I am consistent in my ideas, and so I’m confused about your concerns.

Hopefully through my actions people will see that I will be doing my very best in my new role to help make things better, not worse.